Using Fiverr Could Be Bad For Your Sites
Ok calm down, I know I sound like some crazy radical.
Everyone knows that using Fiverr is the answer to all online problems, there have been at least a couple of wso reports talking about the best fiverr gigs and every forum I visit is full of how great the site is. But hear me out and let me say upfront that my feeling on the site can be applied to many other tools. It is how you are using Fiverr that worries me not the place itself.
Fiver is a superb idea, people make money by offering services in just about every niche possible. The site is a tool in your toolkit.
- You want some facebook likes, go to fiverr
- You want some tweets, go to fiverr
- You want some articles spun (really badly normally) ..well you get the picture
Sounds great doesn’t it, you get facebook likes and they get some money (only $4 because the guys that own the site take $1) and everyone is happy..
So how do the suppliers on the site make more money? They increase their income by selling more gigs, the more people who pay them to provide likes/tweets/spins the happier they are.
It's Only $5 Right
Many of these people use software to build up the initial twitter or facebook accounts and they use software to post to them. Software makes it fast to post , so they can post more and earn more each day.
So far sounds good doesn’t it?
I am sure that you heard about the Google Dance, people’s sites rank ok then suddenly don’t..
They dance around the bottom of the serps but often take forever to make there way back to the top. This is often causes by mass link dumping, someone put 1k blog comments out in a day and wondered why they got to dance, or by “unnatural linking”.
Getting 50 Facebook likes or being retweeted 100 times are not bad things on their own, it is how you get them and the time frame that worries me.
Real likes do not usually come in 5 mins, sure if someone launches some super hot story they will get them but then the links will carry on for more than 10 mins. A real site with real tweets and likes (and shares..more on on shares vs likes another day) will carry on getting them as the news is shared and spreads out.
So my two main issues are
Link Velocity – Google know what real link profiles look like. They do not get 100 likes on a Monday and then no more, that sudden blip in links looks out of place
Are They Any Use – I used to always say that any links are good links, I would not say that now. Times change and we have to change with them. Throwing a bucket load of terrible links at our sites could actually do them more harm than good.
I am not saying stop using Fiverr all together I just want people to think about what they are doing. Not all links are created equal and the same is true of Facebook likes or tweets. A Facebook like or tweet from someone who has a genuine following that is relevant to your niche is worth far more than any one you can get from someone on Fiverr.
Spending $5 and expecting massive movement is not realistic..You could actually end up causing harm
Think about your link building
Think through the link building you are doing and realize that Google are getting better at spotting all these fake things we do to try and manipulate them.
Design a link profile that you want for your site and then build based on that profile
Hope you have enjoyed this, I know it may be a bit radical in comparison to what you are hearing other places about fiverr. Feel free to leave a comment below with your feelings about fiverr (and other outsourcing places).
Ok things I want to cover in my blog posts this year (hey its end of November already) are shares vs likes, love can bring money and anything else I can think of. Anything you would like to hear me share my thoughts on?
While I’ve never used Fivver, I know several people who have with mixed results. Sounds like some people are successful in their choice of what to promote while others are not as successful. One of the complaints I heard was that the time they spent was not worth the $4.00 they received.
I agree with you on the backlinking. For some reason people think those who are involved in the Google changes are stupid. Not the case at all! I think they are very much looking after what is best for the web. The moves they are making to insure websites have good, up-to-date content rather than just get slapped up with a couple of posts and then let go to hopefully earn money, are right on.
It will be interesting to see what they come up with next.
Hi Edie
I spend so much time looking through results and see so many sites that are just rubbish and they rank. I do not think Googles Algo is 100% accurate/relevant and at times it makes no sense at all!
I think that some of the stuff on Fiverr is worth using. There are some gigs where you can buy fixed links from a sites home page and they are worth looking at.
Paul
Paul:
I am glad to hear you talking like this. I don’t think it is radical at all. And it is not only Fiverr, but the multitudes of backlinking companies, in general that are available. I see the IM world kind of in two seperate camps. There is SBI, then there is the rest of the niche. I am an SBI’er, but watch the rest of the niche also. Most IMers have no problem with throwing thousands of links at a website. Some will stick and some won’t. But to me, it is like buying votes in an election. Not reasonable or ethical. A backlink should be a vote in your niche that your content is good. And SBI’s business building model has been teaching this for years.
But many other IMers, either don’t know or don’t care that this 1000s and 1000s of backlinks, philosophy is not good and the search engines will catch up to them sooner or later. But you mention this among other IM forums and you are the bad guy. So again, thanks for your comments and I do agree with you.
Dave
I just had to answer this – There is SBI, then there is the rest of the niche? I am against racism, sexism and here we have a new “ism” Those who don’t belong to SBI are somehow inferior beings?
I know you won’t post this comment Paul, but I don’t care. Someone has to stand up against these sanctimonious SBI pratts and their king of waffle Mr KE.
Ridiculous!
Wendy
lol..
well you are an approved poster so it got posted on its own..
I have never used SBI, seems crazy to pay $200+ a year for a site, you could join weebly and make just as good a site for $3 a month..
I have also never really take any of it too personally. I do agree that the 1k’s of links must be good idea does not work so much now. I do mention this on forums and places, but I do not expect anyone to take any notice, we all have free will and do what we want with the info we are given.
I think my attitude to linking is only changing because I am spending so much time looking through tools like seomoz’s open site explorer.
I am sure Dave did not mean to come across as sanctimonious and offend anyone..Oh and who is Mr KE?
See I am probably missing out on loads of online scuffles by just doing my own thing all the time..
Have a good Christmas if I do not hear from you before Wendy
Paul
Well, I just checked in to this page. Guess I should respond. I really hope Wendy, that your comments are made from first hand accuracy and observation and not from second hand, and more often than not, inaccurate statements. SBI has been around since 1997. I have been Internet Marketing since 2002 and have known about SBI almost as long. I purchased my first SBI subscription in early 2004. I have also been involved in several other means of Internet Marketing. So my impression has become just what I stated above.
Now this does not mean that other methodologies of IM is wrong or that SBI is better. I have stated many times that SBI is not the only game in town. Yes, unfortunately, there are those SBIers that have presented a “my way or the highway” attitude. And as of late, I have had my own misgivings about Ken Evoy and some of his minions’ approach to various topics in the forums.
But that does not detract from my impression of SBI being one of the most complete Internet Business building packages on the Net. Anyone who has been IMing for a while realizes that building a website and building an Internet Business are two intirely different things. Building a website is only a subset of building an Internet Business. There are many ways to build a website; using the block builder within an SBI account, using WordPress software on a paid hosting service, using WYSIWYG software and FTPing to a host of choice, or even being hard core and writing your own HTML code and FTPing.
All of these methods build a website. Further instruction is needed to build a business. SBI comes with all of this in a subscription. This subscription has been $299 per year for as long as I have known about SBI. Now years ago, $25, $30, $50 and more per month was common for hosting services. Then some of the cheap services started coming into effect. I had a real nightmare with one of these types of hosting services (you get what you pay for). These days though, cheap and reputable hosting can be very common, but again an Internet Business building service, in general, doesn’t come with the hosting.
Now again, most Internet Marketers are more serious about building a business and avoid free and cheap hosting services such as WordPress.com (not to be confused with WordPress.org where the WP software is obtained), Weebly, Facebook, Blogger.com, Squidoo, etc. These are tools that can be used but not places to establish a serious successful Internet Business. You don’t own your own business on these sites. You are building up content for them and they could take that content from your control at any time.
Again, SBI has tools, instruction and methodology to build a complete business. Can you acquire similar tools, instruction and methodology with other web building and hosting methods? You bet. Now I am going to say something that many people (and new people to IM) will disagree with me on. The IM niche, in general, over that last few years has started developing a reputation of less than stellar porportions (scumyness, snake oil salesmen, uneithical are a few terms that come to mind). Many tools and services outside the SBI realm now exist. And many of these products/services are less than stellar or eithical. Things like content spinners, content scrappers and purchasing hundreds or thousands of unrelated backlinks are not condusive to good search engine protocol, and quite frankly, deliver inferior content and service to the bottom line customer, the typical Internet surfer. And Paul, I hope I am not treading on your toes. I know you create plugins and such for WP, but so far, I have seen you as an up and up product provider.
SBI tries to stay above board with their tools and teaching, but that doesn’t say that they are better than many other teaching systems available. I do think SBI is better for the new potential Internet Business developer, but that is just my opinion from my last 10 years of experience.
So Wendy, your are definitely intitled to your opinion, but make sure you have your facts straight and I by no means meant to indicate that you or many others, are inferior to SBIers. And again, I myself have started to have problems with SBI attitude over the last year or so.
Dave
Sorry Dave, did not mean to be offensive, I just saw red there for a moment.
I used to be a member of SBI and I actually thought it was pretty good. Their views on building good content were and still are, accurate. After a while though, I started to become disenchanted with some of the letters on the forum. The forum moderators themselves were all very helpful, but it was Ken Evoy who really got my goat after a while. He takes about 100 words to say something that most people could say in 5 and is generally extremely verbose.
There was a post on the forum (not from me, although it expressed my sentiments) about Ken being long winded. This precipitated a torrent of abuse from KE supporters to the extent that it was quite frightening – almost like cult worship in fact.
Also he is always bashing WordPress. It’s fine to do self promotion, nor a good look when at the expense of some other individual or product..
Thanks for reading
Wendy
I wanted to comment on the Fiverr issue. I haven’t used it for these purposes, but I have to wonder about the “penalty” effect. I just don’t think a site will get penalized for using these tactics. What I do think is these kind of tactics just won’t have much value. Think about it – If a site could get penalized for this then it would CHEAP to “penalize” your competitors sites and knock them down… and that just doesn’t happen.
Sorry to say it does happen, been there done that in my earlier days.
My objection is not to fiverr, it is to people not thinking what they are doing and how they are using the things offered on there. Trust me if you throw a bucket load of crappy links at a site which does not have a strong link profile you can hurt it in the short/medium term. You can recover but I have seen it taking months and months to do that.